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Best Study Tips to Retain Information by Donald Giddings deals with the fact that studying is an essential part of learning. No matter how young or old you are, you can benefit from studying when learning something new. Fortunately, the best study tips to retain information can help you succeed at whatever you do and he covers them here.

Introduction

• For some people, retaining information is harder than it is for others. No matter how much you study, you may struggle to retain the information you are intaking. With the right study methods, you can increase the information you retain and improve test scores.

Best Study Tips to Retain Information

• When it comes to studying, not everyone is the same. Certain study methods work better for some people than they do for others. However, researchers have found some of the study methods to retain information.

Hand Write Your Notes

• Though in this day and age many people prefer to use laptops to take notes, writing done your notes with paper and a pencil can help you better retain the information. Writing notes by hand allows you to retain more information and get a better comprehension of what you are learning. By writing your notes down, you retain information for longer, allowing for better recall when taking a test.

Learn In Multiple Ways

• When you have the chance, learn in as many ways as possible. This can include taking notes, listening to recordings, using visuals, and reading out loud. According to the author, neurologist and teacher Judy Willis, by learning in more than one way, you are further sealing that information into your mind. (Willis, J. Brain-based teaching strategies for improving students’ memory, learning, and test-taking success. Review of Research. Childhood Education, 83(5), 31-316, 2008).
• “The more regions of the brain that store data about a subject, the more interconnection there is. This redundancy means students will have more opportunities to pull up all of those related bits of data from their multiple storage areas in response to a single cue. This cross-referencing of data means we have learned, rather than just memorized,” says Willis.
• Learning in multiple ways can also keep you more interested in the subject, as reading notes over and over again can become boring. By expanding your ways of studying, you can improve the information you retain. When possible, seek out demonstrations and use visual aids.

Teach Someone The Information You Learned

• One of the best ways to retain the information you just learned is to teach it to others. When you translate what you’ve learned into your own words, you are further solidifying the information you learned into your brain.
• There are many ways you can teach someone the information you’ve learned. Create a podcast, write a blog post, create a presentation, or participate in a discussion. Studies have found that by teaching what you have learned, you can retain up to 90% of that information. (D’Souza, S. (2020, May 28). How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn)

Practice Recall and Test Yourself

• An important part of retaining what you study is by getting information from short term to long term memory. Changing short-term memories to long-term memories takes time. By distributing your studying over time, you can change the information you’ve learned into long term memories and improve recall when practiced.
• Recalling what you’ve learned can be a more effective form of studying than just sitting there reading your notes. By testing yourself on what you’ve learned, you are able to dig information out of your long term memories. If you are wanting to engage in critical thinking and problem solving, you can draw on the information you have in your long term memories and from around your environment.
• You can also practice recalling your memory by using flashcards and online quizzes to test yourself. When putting aside notes and textbooks, using recall to study can be a powerful way to improve memory. Purdue psychology professor Jeffrey Karpicke was part of a study that proved recalling things from memory was an integral part of studying. (Karpicke, J. D. (2017). Retrieval-based learning: A decade of progress. In J. T. Wixted (Ed.), Cognitive psychology of memory, Vol. 2 of Learning and memory: A comprehensive reference (J. H. Byrne, Series Ed.) (pp. 487-514). Oxford: Academic Press.)
• “Learning is about retrieving. So it is important to make retrieval practice an integral part of the learning process,” says Karpicke.

Create a Stress-Free Study Environment

• To improve your studying, make sure you have a comfortable environment that is free of any stress. Get rid of any distractions such as your phone or TV and find a quiet area away from people.
• Essential oils can also be used to create a relaxing environment that can boost your studying. By using aromatherapy, you can boost your cognitive abilities which can lead to better concentration.

Improve Your Study Habits

• By following these study methods, you can improve the way you take in information. They are designed to help you efficiently and effectively maintain the information you need to know. Good studying often goes beyond just reading your notes over and over again.

Green Living Zone

• Donald Giddings is founder and editor in chief at Green Living Zone. A lifelong sustainability enthusiast, Donald is always looking for the best way to live in harmony with nature. When he is not trying out new eco-friendly recipes, he writes engaging content about green, sustainable ways to maintain your home, body, and soul, readily sharing his abundant experience with other green living aficionados.

Sources

Taylor and Francis Online

Practicing Memory Recall Boosts Science Learning

How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn

Scientific American – Short Term to Long Term Memory
Medicine.llu.edu Brain-Based Retention Techniques

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Tips for Helping Your Child Learn How to Drive by Craig Middleton is a good place to start if your child is nearing the age when it’s time to learn how to drive. Even if your child may not need their own car soon it’s wise to get this document so they have if they do need it someday.

Learning to drive and getting your first car are major milestones in life, and the same is true of passing that knowledge onto your children. Here’s what you need to know in order to prepare your child for passing their driver’s test, getting a car, and approaching the finances.

Help Your Child Study

Before your child can take their driving test, they’ll first need to pass a written test. This test is meant to instill your child with the rules of the road and covers things like how to successfully navigate intersection traffic and how to respond to the presence of a school bus. This kind of information can prove to be pretty dry reading, and there is a persistent rumor that reading the manual isn’t necessary or even that doing so is harmful to your chances of success. This isn’t the case, of course, because you’ll be held accountable for a variety of numerical information regarding things like fines that simply can’t be intuited. That means that you will need to ensure that your child is ready for their written test despite their natural teenage instincts. It’s important to convince your child to take reading the manual as seriously as they would school reading materials, and that means taking notes. Taking notes increases your child’s ability to remember new information, and those notes can be taken on flashcards that you can use to quiz them.

Exam Time

When it comes to preparing them for the driving test, you can consider teaching them yourself. However, it can be difficult to teach what has become second nature to you, because you often don’t even think about what you’re doing as you drive. If you’re unsure about your teaching abilities, or maybe you don’t have the extra time, it may be a safer choice to enroll your child in a driver’s school. This is typically a 30-40 hour course broken up throughout a few weeks. An instructor will guide and drive with your child to make sure they are prepared and well informed for their driving test. This option will also allow your child to take a practice driving test with the instructor before they do the real thing. Because of this, your child will feel more confident and less stressed.

Practice Patience

As mentioned above, teaching something is a whole different experience than learning a skill or performing the actions yourself. This can be frustrating for some, because much what you know like the back of your hand isn’t common sense like you may have thought. However, your frustration will make your child more anxious and, in turn, less receptive to the information you’re trying to impart. Instead, be willing to explain every detail and answer questions multiple times if needed. Try to put yourself in the mindset of someone who knows nothing about operating a motor vehicle so that nothing seems too obvious to warrant those questions. Most importantly, be aware that mistakes are an inevitable part of learning a new skill, so approach these mistakes from a perspective of understanding and remain calm.

Financing a Car

Motor vehicles can be expensive. However, getting your child a new car can be the preferable alternative because maintaining a complex machine such as a car can either require an immense amount of knowledge or costly visits to a mechanic. However, auto financing requires good credit, and that means that you need to have a good credit score in order to make that high cost more tenable on a budget. Likewise, if your child will be taking responsibility for paying for the car, they will need to work on their credit before trying to make a purchase. This can be done by getting your child a credit card, although this entails a certain level of risk. However, if your child can overcome his or her teenage impulses, a credit card can help raise their credit score, because their use of the credit card determines the amount of money they’ll owe. This means that credit card bills can always be paid on time if used responsibly, and that is how your credit score improves. Most young people, often regardless of credit, will require a cosigner with adequate credit in order to buy a new car, and you’ll most likely have to fill that role.

They Don’t Always Need a Car

You may feel pressure as a parent to provide a car for your child as soon as they turn 16, but this isn’t always a need. If buying and maintaining a car is too big of a challenge for your family at the moment, it’s okay to put it off. There are plenty of options to ensure your kid is able to get to where he/she needs to be on a daily basis. You can offer to pick them up/drop them off, they can carpool with friends, or take public transportation to school and work.

Even if your child never needs or uses a car through their teenage years, it is still vital that you emphasize the importance of earning a driver’s license. You never know when this document will come in handy. It’s a simple form of identification and gives your child access to renting a car as they get into their mid 20’s.

Teaching your child to drive will be an important moment not only in their lives but also in your own. For a teenager, learning to drive and getting their first car represents the first step into adulthood, and they’ll depend on you to guide them. These tips will allow you to provide the best possible training and prime your child for success.

Craig Middleton

• Craig is a New York City-based retired business consultant, who is an expert in education and cultural trends. He has a Masters of Business Administration and a Masters in Education from St. Johns and loves sharing his knowledge on the side through his writing. If you have any questions or comments you can direct them to Craig at craigmiddleton18@gmail.com.

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Fun Exercises To Quickly Improve Creative Thinking by Ashley Lipman others a number of suggestions that you and your students or family can use to get the creative juices flowing. See how many of her tips you already use and consider which ones you might want to add to boost your creativity.

Getting Past Brain Blocks

There’s an old saying: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Many times you’ll set a day aside so you can get something done. Then you get all prepared for the work, and you can’t write a word, or record a note—or whatever creative thing you’ve set yourself to do.

Maddening, isn’t it? How do you reliably, continuously stimulate your imagination productively? How do you overcome constraining mental blocks when they backhand your productive day out of the clear blue? Well, for one thing, you need to separate what you’re doing. If you’re trying to force art, just stop; you can’t do it.

The best you can do is produce an approximation of your talent which has no vision behind it, and so no “soul”. However, if you are creatively involved in certain projects requiring your talent, you don’t have the luxury of awaiting inspiration.

Ideally, you should avoid putting yourself in a position where the artistic output of a qualitative kind aesthetically speaking is demanded of you. Realistically, you can’t always do that. So next I’ll go over a few ways you can creatively unclog your mind and get things done more quickly.

1. Take A Walk, Keep A Voice Recorder With You.

A change of scenery can do a lot to get your imagination going. If you’ve been writing a story at home on your laptop, and your brain just won’t kick into high gear, maybe go to a local coffee shop that you like. If that doesn’t work, take a walk in a park with a voice recorder should any ideas come to you. Also, keep one near your bed in case you wake up with a bright idea.

Sometimes the ideas are too large for a voice recording, but sitting down with a notebook is a bit more inconvenient—still, for some, this is a better option. Certainly, it depends on your particular personality, and the things you’re working on. The point is, sometimes you need to shake things up a bit. When you do that, new ideas develop as a consequence of the change.

2. Role-Playing Games

RPGs, or Role Playing Games, aren’t quite what modern people think of when they see the abbreviation “RPG”. Today, everybody thinks of video games, but RPGs started with things like Dungeons and Dragons back in the seventies and eighties.

You might run a fast little D&D campaign to reap some of the ideas from the experience. These are inexpensive and widely available in many different iterations. D&D mods exist which have fantasy themes, modern themes, and science fiction themes; so you’re not restricted to a “classic” approach.

You don’t have to rely solely on D&D as a means of role-playing, that’s just the most common option. Also, it’s a fun group activity. Similarly, though, you can throw a bunch of words in a hat and pull a few out at random to stimulate your imagination. It’s best if you have people write down words you didn’t think of yourself if you go this route.

3. Meditation, Exercise, And Search Engines

In the morning, you should take the time to meditate. Now that need not necessarily involve an eastern religious practice. You can meditate on traditional scriptures if that suits you. You might meditate on political writings, poems, fiction, or just the outdoors before you. Different meditation motifs exist for different people.

Similarly, working out can clear your mind and give you interesting ideas. If you work out an hour a day, you’ll get ideas. Catch a few of those ideas and use them as fodder later on. The key here is isolating situations in life where the mind naturally wanders and using those instances to your advantage.

Everybody’s mind does this. Those who are the most creative have simply learned to harness the reality. But it’s easier said than done, and if all else fails, don’t be afraid of using search engines for ideas to help stimulate your imagination.

4. Music, Journaling, Doodling, And Stimulating Conversations

Music can put you in a sort of emotional fugue where the ideas flow like wine. Journaling every day can capture old ideas you can refer to later when you reach a blockage. Doodling or freewriting can pop up concepts from your subconscious, making them available to your conscious mind as you go about getting ideas.

Lastly, stimulating conversations with unique individuals gives you the benefit of their mind and their subconscious as a field for idea mining. Keep the eccentric people close, and refer to them when you have no other recourse.

Clearing The Up Creativity Blockages

Take a walk, change the scenery, look into RPGs, meditate, exercise, utilize search engines, listen to the right music, journal, doodle, and have stimulating conversations. All these things can be used to help you think of things, and be imaginative. One thing you shouldn’t do is isolate yourself in the same routine continuously. Good luck. Thanks, Ashley. She can be reached at mark@outreachmama.com.

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Education as a Resource by Jenna Smith offers several examples of how education along with the discovery and use of information is necessary for the survival of civilization and for enhancing the quality of human life. While no one is an expert in all of the topics mentioned here, they may inspire students to pursue one or any other topic that peaks their interests.

Introduction

Learning is seen as a model for self-actualization, a system put in place to teach how the world works and equipping us with tools for better living. Education is a system that gives instructions meant to provide a calculated effect. Learning provides society with factual knowledge, job skills, and cultural norms. The wisdom tools help us understand complex undertakings like: How to get to Mars, How to repair a heart, Trading in the stock market, and much more.

The Stock Market

General Electric, stock symbol NYSE GE, is a tech company based in Massachusetts in the United States dealing with energy generation, management, and application solutions. The company’s average annual price target is $9.13. Data shows an upside of 32.77% with the targeted price high being $13.00 and the low price target being $5.00.

General Electric currently has seven hold ratings and eight buy ratings for the stock. With this data, the resulting consensus rating is “Buy.” This data is collected and presented by the use of technology. Machine learning has to lead to a better understanding of the stock market and, in turn, can give you better knowledge about whether to buy a stock.

Up-To-Date Information

This kind of information has to be readily available around the world for a company to continue trading in the stock exchange. The entire human civilization uses the financial sector. It needs fast learning access platforms, including the internet, with up-to-date information about relevant critical factors to its functionality and the likes of the Internet of Things. These systems require databases of information from which decisions are made. This system contains information previously tested, observed, and stored in facilities like libraries and, lately, internet servers worldwide known collectively as the cloud.

Information in these facilities is updated with every experience that humanity encounters to prevent dependence on outdated data to improve the chances of achieving the desired outcome with each trial.

Traveling to Mars?

Humanity, as a species, depends on commonly used resources. These resources are still abundant on our home planet, but this will change according to analytic predictions made concerning population growth and demand. (Such predictions have been wrong in the past.) This requires humans to become a multi-planetary species soon if it is to survive. That fact demands more learning experience about neighbor planets and asteroids that can be mined and colonized.

The planet Mars is a close option due to its proximity to earth, which raises a need for knowledge about space navigation settlement and survivability on a planet not meant to support human life. The level of expertise requires trained specialists that can only be fostered in an advanced learning society.

Space is a wild place, and enduring there requires us to understand human anatomy and how we react to the space environment. This revelation calls for an understanding of how individual organs work and how to repair them when they fail due to the various factors.

The Human Heart

There have been outstanding achievements in the treatment of heart failure. Technological advancements in heart treatment have reduced fatalities. An example is the artificial pacesetter placement that substitutes when the natural ones fail in order to improve a patient’s mortality. With every new technology, heart failure is becoming more manageable. As of 2018, about two million Americans suffered from severe heart failure each year. This is data collected before the development of the MitraClip, which is used to repair the mitral valve, which can significantly improve an individual’s quality of life.

Incredible Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A system of passing knowledge between individuals or generations is an essential requirement for any civilization’s survival and development. Breakthroughs in AI learning helps machines perform complex tasks like collection and analysis of data by weather satellites and robots investigating the effects of pollution on our oceans. This has led to more discoveries on how humans can coexist and interact with machines. The collection and processing of data on global pandemics like the coronavirus could not have been possible without such developments.

Learning satisfies the need for personal development. Formal learning, however, is designed to ensure universal access to education, which will not always help achieve individual fulfillment. All of us have goals we intend to achieve, which requires the opportunity for self-development. Embracing education plays a significant part in individual fulfillment as it benefits society. Thanks, Jenna. She can be reached at jennaleesmith1@gmail.com

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